


After the Storm

by raisinbean



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 14:21:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8755936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raisinbean/pseuds/raisinbean
Summary: Gokudera is dead. Hibari and Yamamoto are not.





	

i.

Hibari kicks down Sasagawa Ryohei’s door and lays Hayato on the couch. “Fix him.”

Sasagawa is at the kitchen counter, having a nightcap. “What the hell happened?” he says, leaving his drink to come over. He hisses under his breath as he looks Hayato over.

“He was cut with a poisoned blade,” says Hibari. “I tried to suck it out, but it’s already spread.”

Hayato is bleeding from a gash on the side of his head and cuts along his torso and legs, hastily bandaged with the rags of Hibari’s jacket. His face is very pale, his lips almost colorless where they are not flecked with blood. Hibari stands at Hayato’s side as Sasagawa uses the maximum output of his sun’s regenerative powers on Hayato. Hibari can feel his own wounds tingling and closing, but Hayato’s blood continues to soak into the cushions, just as it soaked through Hibari’s once white shirt.

“It’s not working,” says Hibari. Sasagawa lets his sun flames go out. Hibari clutches Sasagawa’s arm. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Sasagawa looks at Hibari, and Hibari knows.

He heard Hayato’s ragged breathing as he hurtled down the roads, swerving at corners and scraping cars. Hayato coughed up some blood when Hibari lifted him out of the car. Hayato’s head lolled back as Hibari ascended the steps to the door.

Somewhere, Hayato’s breath was lost.

Hayato lies still on the couch, exactly as Hibari placed him.

Hibari releases Sasagawa’s arm as he blacks out.

 

ii.

Yamamoto is the second to arrive, after Tsuna. Ryohei has his hand on Tsuna’s shoulder while Tsuna kneels beside Gokudera, holding Gokudera’s hand against his forehead, his eyes closed. Yamamoto takes one dazed step inside the room, the smell of blood filling his head—then has his sword out of its sheath when someone walks out of the shadows behind him.

It is Hibari, who does not look at him or his blade. Hibari, who never misses any excuse to fight, walks past Yamamoto and out the door in bandages and a bloodstained shirt.

In the morning, reports come that two rival mafia families have been slaughtered down to the last man. Beaten to death.

Tsuna puts his head in his hands for a moment, then asks Yamamoto and Reborn to find Hibari. As they walk out, Tsuna is on the phone with tears in his eyes, telling the person on the other end that he needs to see him or her. It is probably a woman, and Tsuna is imagining having to tell her what happened.

“I’m going to his house,” says Yamamoto.

“You won’t find him there,” says Reborn.

Yamamoto shrugs. Reborn crooks a finger at Yamamoto, so he stoops down—Reborn has grown to Yamamoto’s waist—and Reborn pats his cheek twice, gently.

Hibari’s house is in a small mountainside village about an hour outside of Rome, near a nature reserve. He could never bear to reside in the Vongola manor. The first time Yamamoto made the trip, he got lost twice just on the way to the village. Upon approaching an old woman on the street, she pointed Yamamoto in the direction of Signor Hibari before he even had to ask in his poor Italian. When he hopped onto the correct doorstep and knocked, Hibari let him in without a word.

Now the front door is ajar, the doorjamb split where the lock once nestled inside—the debris left in the wake of a well-placed heel. Yamamoto barely pushes the door and it swings until it hits an overturned shoe shelf. What was once an airy and tidy home is now a ruin. All the furniture is overturned, some in pieces. The walls bear the bruises of things having reached the end of their trajectory.

He goes upstairs to the bedroom. The contents of the closet are shredded and strewn about the room, but some articles remain hanging, untouched: a number of silk shirts, some suit jackets and slacks, a couple pairs of shoes, and a leather jacket. Yamamoto fingers the sleeve of a shirt—dark maroon, a color Hibari would never wear. Yamamoto raises the sleeve to his nose; it smells strongly of cigarettes. He finds a lighter in a pocket of the leather jacket, along with some euro and yen coins.

Reborn was right. Hibari is not here, and never will be again.

 

iii.

Atop a precipice overlooking the woods and lake of the nature reserve, Reborn finds Hibari sprawled on his back. Both he and his tonfa lying beside him are crusted in dried blood—not his own, of course. His eyes remain closed, but he is aware of Reborn’s presence.

“Are you looking at the stars?” says Reborn.

It is midday. Hibari is warm, heat percolating in his clothes, in his pores. “I don’t want to hear your riddles today, baby,” Hibari says in a low voice. He came to this place, at an impossible height for a normal human to climb, in a deserted part of the reserve, specifically to be alone. No one but Reborn could have found him.

“You’re weak,” says Reborn.

This makes Hibari open his eyes. He squints up at Reborn’s unsmiling, youthful face and ageless black eyes.

“You’ve never lost anything until now,” Reborn says, unrelenting. “Not anything that truly mattered.”

 _He did not matter_. _He was nothing to me._

Hibari’s lips part slightly, but nothing comes out.

“Now you’re wishing you’d killed him yourself. He did not die because you let him. He died in spite of your efforts to keep him alive.”

When Hayato was cut the first time, neither of them realized what it meant. The poison was slow; Hayato only fell after successive cuts. And when Hayato did not get back up to counter Hibari’s taunts, Hibari picked him up. He did not stop to finish off the wounded. He ran with Hayato limp in his arms.

Hayato mumbled something against Hibari’s chest, and Hibari’s automatic response was, “Shut up.”

Uncharacteristically, Hayato did.

Reborn sits on his heels, casting his shadow over Hibari’s face. “Do you understand now? How weak you are?”

Hibari did not sleep last night. When he lay down on the cold stone of the precipice in the early morning and closed his eyes, his ears pricked as he heard the echo of Hayato’s voice. He still could not make out the words.

“Shut up,” says Hibari, lunging up with a tonfa.

Reborn catches the tonfa in his small hand. “Make me.”

So Hibari lashes out with a kick and Reborn jumps back. Hibari grabs his other tonfa and attacks, meeting Reborn’s pet lizard turned into a baton with a clang, blood roaring in his ears—yet all the while Hayato’s whisper resounds faintly in his head.

 

iv.

The entire Vongola famiglia shows up for Gokudera’s funeral, and representatives from the allied families as well, including the Chiavarone, Simon, Bovino, Millefiore. The Arcobaleno, a line of children. Hundreds of people dressed in black, everyone who ever knew Gokudera, stand amongst the graves.

Everyone except for Hibari.

Most people have subordinates to hold umbrellas over them. Yamamoto looks to his left and right, at Tsuna’s usually upright hair flattening under the rain, at the drops sliding down the faces of his fellow Guardians. Even Mukuro is here, his arms folded around Chrome’s neck. Their eyes are clear. They have each other.

Bianchi is on her knees, head against Reborn’s chest and hands clenched in the front of his suit. The way he holds her shoulder, his vertical posture while bearing her weight, hints at the man inside. Leon drinks rain off the brim of his fedora.

Tsuna knows the loss of one of his Guardians, his right hand man, will open up the seemingly vulnerable Vongola to new incursions and he must rally the family to counteract that. His eulogy starts strong, recounting Gokudera’s accomplishments and sacrifices, how he always put the family first, how his legacy would set an example.

“He was… my best friend.” Tsuna’s face is wet, from the rain presumably, but his voice is plainly crying. In this moment, he is not the Vongola Decimo; he is a man who has lost someone he loved, someone whose presence was as constant as gravity.

Gokudera is dead. His coffin is lowered into a grave beginning to fill with rainwater, drawn by gravity out of the clouds above. Then his coffin is drowned in flowers, each mourner tossing one in—white roses and lilies, mainly. When Lambo drops his rose in, his face crumples. He had done a good job keeping it together so far. Gokudera would have been proud.

Yamamoto lets a red rose fall from his hand to top the pile. It would have made Gokudera laugh. Yamamoto gave Gokudera a red rose on White Day, long ago, and Gokudera said, “I’m not a chick,” but smiled and kept it anyway. Red suited Gokudera. Colors, vivid colors suited Gokudera, contrasting his light hair and pale eyes and the smoke he blew out of his mouth.

The rain dwindles to a misting drizzle by the time people begin to disperse. Yamamoto lingers and sits down on the damp grass in front of the burial mound, arms slung over his bent knees. He pats his jacket and pulls out a cigarette from the box in his inside pocket. He lights it and takes a long pull, holding the smoke in for a moment, then blowing it out in a long stream. Imagines all the smoke leaving his mouth are the memories he will never have.

He is on his second cigarette when he sees someone approaching from the corner of his eye. His fingers twitch for the hilt of his sword, his pulse quickening just slightly, ready. He knows who it is.

The man stops two paces away.

“Yo, Hibari,” says Yamamoto. “So you made it.”

“He should not be here,” says Hibari. He wears all black, suit, tie, and shirt. His hair clings to his pale face. He has a bruise on his cheek.

Yamamoto looks up at Hibari, blinking raindrops out of his eyes. “Where else would he be?”

“He should be in Japan.”

Yamamoto snorts. “You know how he was. Wouldn’t want to be ten feet away from Tsuna, not even in death.”

Hibari’s mouth tightens a little. He stares at the headstone.

Yamamoto feels a coldness spread inside his chest. “But I guess you’d rather hear that he didn’t want to be far from you.”

Hibari says nothing, only shifts his weight a little. Yamamoto senses Hibari is about to depart, so he holds out the cigarette box to Hibari and nods at the ground beside him. Hibari takes a cigarette and sits. Yamamoto cups his hand around Hibari’s cigarette as he lights it.

“When will you leave?” says Yamamoto.

Hibari only looses a cloud of smoke, but Yamamoto hears his answer anyway: soon.

Yamamoto pushes Hibari’s hand aside when he tries to bring the cigarette to his lips again. Hibari allows it, looking at Yamamoto without expression.

Yamamoto leans in, eyes closed, to meet Hibari’s lips with his own. Hibari’s lips are a little chapped. When he opens a bit to accommodate Yamamoto’s roving, Yamamoto licks the scent of MS cigarettes off the inside of his mouth.

Gokudera was never too picky about cigarettes, but he only ever smoked MS while in Italy.

With his eyes closed, Yamamoto can pretend the smoky wet interior his tongue is exploring belongs to Gokudera… Until teeth close on his tongue with precise cruelty, just the right amount of pain to make him flinch back. He touches a finger to his tongue. It comes away wet, but only with saliva.

He does not watch Hibari go.

 

v.

Hibari returns home to Namimori. The new mall has been finished, but otherwise the town has changed very little since his last departure. He could walk into the reception room at Namimori Middle and find it just the same as the day he met Gokudera Hayato face to face for the first time, and knocked him out.

Hibari was never entirely sure what was so alluring about Gokudera Hayato, what drove him to chase when Hayato flitted through his life. Hayato smoked when he was underage, talked like a delinquent, dressed like a _gaijin_ , and did not use honorifics with anyone aside from Sawada Tsunayoshi. His fondness for explosives was annoying. He was often annoying himself.

The most logical explanation was pheromones—that Hayato could arouse Hibari without fail because of the way they were made, their complementary genes calling irresistibly for their counterparts. Never mind that they were both male. It did not stop Hibari from fucking his name permanently into Hayato’s body.

It had to be pheromones. He can still smell Hayato in the bedroom, a phantom presence of cigarette smoke and gunpowder and their shared shampoo and the underlying scent distinct to Hayato’s skin. Even now the damned smell gets to him. He is having a physical reaction. His breath shortens. His diaphragm convulses. His nose stings.

He grabs something at random from Hayato’s side of the closet, intending to dash it on the floor, to do the opposite of what he’d done to his house in Italy and destroy all remnants of Hayato in this house. This is his house. He will not leave it.

What he has in his hand is an olive green yukata with a subtle pattern of leaves of grass. He had it made for Hayato once he tired of Hayato appropriating his own yukata. When Hayato first tried it on, Hibari liked the look of it so much that he did not let Hayato take it off while they fucked against the wall.

He wonders for a moment what Hayato was buried in. The thought makes him nauseous. He drops the yukata on the floor and leaves it there, knowing it would infuriate Hayato.

 

vi.

“Why have you come here, Yamamoto Takeshi?” Hibari is wearing a dark purple yukata loosely tied with a white belt. When he turns to look up at Yamamoto from where he sits on a pillow seat, the yukata opens up nearly to his waist, and Yamamoto’s eyes linger on the shadows collected in the curves of his abdominal muscles and the dip of his belly button.

Hibari is the first person Yamamoto visits upon landing Japan. He has had a strange yearning to see Hibari in the same way that birds will take flight when their inner workings say it is time to migrate. Homing in.

“I’ve come to kiss you again.” Yamamoto expects Hibari to attack, or scowl in the best case.

Hibari almost laughs, a quick exhalation. “I am not Gokudera Hayato.”

Yamamoto pauses, off balance. Hibari is more perceptive of his motivations than he would have thought. “Gokudera is dead.”

Now it is Hibari’s turn to take a hit. Something flares in his eyes, but is extinguished as quickly as it comes. “I will not be a replacement.”

“No one can replace him.” Yamamoto extends a hand to Hibari.

Hibari takes it and rises to his feet.

 

vii.

Yamamoto and Gokudera were sixteen when they first started kissing and fumbling under each other’s clothes. Yamamoto was at a private school in the next town with a baseball scholarship, while Gokudera went to Namimori High with Tsuna. Their trio was broken up, and perhaps that was the catalyst. Yamamoto came home on the weekends and they all hung out, but it was different. He was missed. It made everyone at home treat him just a bit nicer, including Gokudera.

Gokudera was really nice to him when it was just the two of them in his bedroom. Yamamoto was happy to go along with Gokudera’s newfound interest. He had always liked Gokudera, even when Gokudera could not string together two kind words to say to him. The change in Gokudera’s attitude did not concern him. He only wondered why he had never noticed before how beautiful Gokudera was.

Two years later, Tsuna went to Italy to assume leadership of the Vongola. Gokudera went with him. Whenever Tsuna came home to Japan, Gokudera came to Yamamoto.

Yamamoto saved up enough money for the plane fare by the time he graduated college. Tsuna offered to bring him, of course, but Yamamoto wanted to buy his own way. He wanted to earn the right, knowing Gokudera would respect that.

He was too late. He entered Tsuna’s office to see Gokudera sitting back with one ankle on the other knee, and at Gokudera’s side was Hibari, his arm along the back of the settee. They were not quite touching, but their proximity and the heaviness of their gazes on Yamamoto told him all he needed to know.

The love bite peeking out of Gokudera’s collar was just the period of the sentence.

 

viii.

Hibari always had respect for Yamamoto Takeshi. Like Hibari, Yamamoto stood out, but in a much more conventional way—the star of the baseball team, good-looking and sociable, a friend to all. Hibari had respect for Yamamoto’s fearlessness, and his candid nature. Yamamoto was friendly to Hibari, undeterred by Hibari’s reputation or hostility.

Things changed when Sawada Tsunayoshi came along and overturned Namimori with his mafia heritage. Such a frail, pathetic boy. Only the baby could have seen potential in him.

Yamamoto Takeshi’s potential was practically leaking out of his ears and his smiling mouth. Hibari often looked hard at Yamamoto to gauge whether the potential had yet manifested as something into which he could sink his teeth.

The moment when Yamamoto Takeshi chose to stand between him and his prey, the longhaired swordsman, was the moment Yamamoto Takeshi ceased to appear in his view. Yamamoto became yet another herbivore crowding his space, and needed to be removed.

The moment when Yamamoto Takeshi caught his tonfa was the moment his respect returned with such rapidity and strength that it unraveled to reveal a darkly pulsing center.

“Don’t lose,” Hibari said. After Hibari had dealt with Rokudo Mukuro, he intended to come for Yamamoto.

It was likely around then that Gokudera Hayato began harboring similar intentions.

 

iv.

They lie loose-limbed on Hibari’s bed, disheveled garments sticking to their skin. Yamamoto’s underwear and jeans are around his knees. Hibari’s yukata hangs open, the belt lost on the way to the bedroom. Dusk clothes them in shadows.

When Yamamoto’s heart rate has slowed to normalcy and the stickiness on his stomach has dried, he breathes Hibari’s name.

“What?”

“Hibari, I think Gokudera knew this would happen.”

Hibari says nothing, but it is so quiet that Yamamoto hears Hibari swallow.

“I think he wedged himself between us. Not because he was the kind of guy who’d want to jerk us around, but because he was lonely and afraid of being left in the dust. You know, he dedicated his life to Tsuna, but Tsuna could never be only his. Tsuna’s too big. And he needed to have someone, and for someone to have him, if only to have a warm spot on the bed beside him.”

“What are you saying?”

“You know. You know how you are. You hate crowds, but you could put up with Gokudera. He wanted you all along, I can see that now.”

“You had him first.”

“He had me first. I was just a kid. He was too, he just knew what he wanted. He wanted you, but you wouldn’t have him, not then, so he—seduced me. Somehow he did, and I didn’t think twice. I wasn’t thinking about anything—sex or love or whatever. He got to me before the possibility could ever come to my mind. The possibility of you.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“I know. Remember when we went to the future?”

“What about it?”

“We’re almost there. It’s been nine years.”

“That was another timeline. Our future will be vastly different.”

“Yeah. Gokudera was alive then.”

“Many others were dead.”

“Yeah. I saw your future self hitting on Gokudera.”

Hibari snorts a little. “What makes you think so?”

“Gokudera was still trying to open his boxes. I was just gonna check on him. When I opened the door, you had him trapped in his chair. You were sitting on the table and had one foot up on his seat, and when I came in, you were reaching for him. You were smiling. I didn’t know what I was looking at. I thought you were harassing him or something.”

“That was not me.”

“A form of you. I lied and said the girls were gonna have lunch ready soon. When you left the room, you touched the inside of my wrist as you passed by. I wondered about it, of course, but I was more curious about why Gokudera’s face was so red. Now I think you were giving me a hint.”

“Of what?”

Yamamoto gropes for Hibari’s hand on the bed, and when he finds it, his fingers follow the two skinny bones up the inside of Hibari’s wrist.

Hibari is very still. “You’re wrong. Hayato was never someone worthy of my attention, but you were. You could keep up with me, almost.”

“Are you saying you were seduced too?”

“Hayato clawed his way inside my mind. He was so lustful. I could fuck him every day for the rest of my life and never get bored.”

“Don’t lie. It wasn’t just about the sex.”

“I… Hayato…”

“You miss him.”

Hibari turns over, facing away from Yamamoto.

Yamamoto shoves off his clothes and moves closer, wrapping an arm around Hibari and pressing against Hibari’s back. He props up his head on his other hand, chin resting on Hibari’s shoulder. It is too dark to see Hibari’s face, but he can feel Hibari’s stomach trembling.

 

x.

The first time they both manage to get all of their clothes off, they come to a realization: Gokudera bottomed for both of them.

Yamamoto figured that was the case. In his masturbatory fantasies, Gokudera was always on the receiving end because that was the only way Yamamoto had experienced Gokudera. But Yamamoto had also only topped before, and just assumed Hibari would acquiesce once they got the right mood going.

Not so. Hibari’s fingers press into the meat of Yamamoto’s ass with the kind of urgency usually reserved for high-speed driving, or snapping small bones. Yamamoto pauses in his oral ministrations to Hibari’s neck and shoulder. Hibari is pulling Yamamoto’s buttocks apart and poking experimentally at the hole between.

“What are you doing?” Yamamoto says finally, sitting up on Hibari’s hips.

“I’m preparing you,” says Hibari, a fingernail raking over Yamamoto’s anus.

Yamamoto grabs Hibari’s wrists. “For?”

Hibari glares. “For my cock.”          

“And I don’t get a say in this?”

“Do you object, Takeshi?”

“No,” says Yamamoto, preoccupied with Hibari’s usage of his first name. “Wait, I mean, yeah, a little—I just—I just think we should discuss this.”

Hibari turns his face away, his equivalent of rolling eyes. “Do you want to fuck?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to fuck me?”

“Yes.”

“Not today.” Hibari surges up and grips Yamamoto’s jaw with one hand while his other hand attends to both of their cocks. “Today, I want to fuck you.”

And that sounds pretty good to Yamamoto right now, especially with the combined friction of Hibari’s hand and cock. Perhaps tomorrow, or the day after.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading.  
> You can find my other Katekyo Hitman Reborn! fan fiction [here](https://www.fanfiction.net/~raisinbean).


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